Context: After a winter of no tripping, with the temperature warming up and the sun poking through the clouds, I felt it was time to take my first leap back into psychedelia. I really wanted to rework myself, after being disconnected from my emotions for months, and I knew that in order to achieve that I would have to undergo an intense emotional experience. Admittedly I dosed high expecting less intense effects, and I was not ready for the level of intensity I was presented with. This being said, this trip has been the only experience in which I was one hundred percent unaware that I was tripping and thought that it was a real event happening in real time. I have no regrets on the matter.

Qualitative remarks

"If there is anything
I have learned
through everything
I have earned.
It is that,
so simply,
you do not need to understand."

T+00

I woke up at 7am, got showered, weighed 5.3g of gold capped cubensis, ground in coffee grinder, and put them in a cup with orange juice in it. The ground up powder, which smelled awful, rose to the top of the juice, so I just had to stomach the awful taste. I drank at 8:10 and then proceeded to vaporise 1g of kief that I had been saving. For most of the come up I was pretty anxious, I hadn’t tripped in so long and I had gotten myself extremely worked up and excited for this experience. For the first 30 minutes I was anxious, and then the kief that I had been vaping hit me and I felt very relaxed and suddenly elated. I danced around my apartment in glee, ready for the peak to come. Nausea would fade in and out, depending on my position, and I think it was mostly just because of the large amount of orange juice I had to consume.

When I felt my vision moving and saw the walls sliding in and out of their normal position I decided it was time to go lay down in my bed until the peak hit me, because I wasn’t really sure how I’d be reacting. My previous 5g dose was a perfect level for me and I was able to go outside and be social normally, but this hit me far more hard than I had expected.

T+1:00

As I lay in bed the geometry quickly got very defined on my ceiling, multiple layers of shifting geometric shapes, all symmetrical but never repeating over a large space entirely, and I watched as circular flower like formations and large form drifting patterns bleep and bloop in and out of my vision. If I didn’t focus, geometry moved at a quicker space, and for some reason I found the shapes hilarious, and giggled while I watched. As the peak came on I really began to realise how intense psilocin is. Although I have dosed nearly twice as high as this before (9.5g), I wasn’t really conscious or perceptive of anything, so there wasn’t enough attention or comprehension ability in me to be hyper-engaged in what was happening. It was different here, while the visuals and mental delineation got stronger and stronger (while my vision grew clearer), I was squirming around going in and out of bliss and fear. From my speakers in the middle of my room Washed Out’s Paracosm was playing, and I recall thanking the artist for making such a beautiful album that so eloquently transcended into different emotional scapes and I felt as though he had made it with the intention of guiding psychonauts through their journeys.

Filled with appreciation for this musical masterpiece, I sat up, wanting to go outside. I teeter tottered out of my bedroom, and slowly realised how hard I was tripping, my blinds were a mingled, shifting mass of broken lines and liquid edges, my hairs were flowing up my arms like a river, and my lampshades were dancing with the music. My apartment was suddenly alive, ripe with the sun bleeding through my windows, my walls turning around me. I pranced into the kitchen, opened the door, and stepped out into the sun of my back porch. I could see the roofs of houses, but they didn’t really seem separated, it was as if the surfaces of these conglomerations of matter had all meshed together, and now they were sharing the same (as I thought in my head) “dimensional circumstance.” It was pretty intense, too intense, to stare out into a world that no longer had defining lines. I stepped back inside, went into my room, I was flabbergasted, why was it this intense? What had I done wrong?

I was fading in and out of short-term memory failure and thought loops, adding and re-adding the time between then and ingestion, and it kept making less and less sense. I knew what the numbers were, but not what they meant, and I struggled very hard to retrieve that understanding for time. It would not come back, I was doomed. I didn’t want this, I wasn’t ready to lose that. The geometry was expanding into larger and larger formations, soon it wasn’t merely parts of my vision that were moving and morphing, it was all of it. My walls rocking back and forth, like there was a constant but slow moving earthquake, I couldn’t focus on one object at a time, even if I tried to. My perspective was being constantly altered and shifted, light positions changed and objects meshed with one another. This place, where was I? These aren’t my clothes, I was thinking, flopping around my bed like a fish, staring at my floor. Where was I? What? I felt like I had been in bed all day, I didn’t know what was happening. Every sound, every sense, repeated into infinity. Listening to music didn’t make sense, what was he saying? How many times is that synth going to repeat? I tried listening to people talking softly to calm me down, but the speaker’s voice rose up and down and in and out, as if she were singing a song and not speaking. Her words didn’t mean anything to me, she wasn’t making sense. I knew that she was saying words, but what? Her voice echoed in my head, every sound around me suddenly fractalling into space, I tried to talk to people, I was so afraid, but reading sentences was impossible, as I stared into the one I had typed it made profoundly less and less sense with every passing observing second.

Mortified, I’m insane, this has done it, I felt like I had been peaking for hours, it shouldn’t last this long should it? Oh my god, everyone’s been lying to me, my life is a delusion, I AM insane! And I knew it! I could feel every fabric of my understanding for the world around me being unwoven, this intimate destruction, this beautiful chemical, had plunged into me and was emptying my drawers, filling me with nothing. I could feel every sense being taken, my relationships on false pretenses, me misunderstanding everyone’s wishes, I wasn’t taking anyone seriously, I didn’t feel them. I couldn’t think, what was happening? Where was I? What day is it? I knew I was losing it, I thought I had broken my brain, all I could understand were my emotions, but soon those faded from me, and I was left to wallow in discomfort. Nothing made it better, my senses and my internal mental progressions had become one in the same, the world echoed menacingly as I felt the life being sucked out of me, arching squeals of rubber and my own thoughts blooming into nothings right before my eyes. My hands, they looked like millions of hands, they didn’t mean anything to me, how many fingers are there? I put it on my wall, I didn’t even know what the wall was, I thought it was someONE, not someTHING. My hand split in two, each side rotating clockwise and counterclockwise, duplicating themselves, until it was merely a shifting shape. Horrified, I put it back under my blanket.

I stood up to take a shower, and was only in there for ten minutes. While in the bathroom I tried to throw up, because I kept burping and just wanted it out. I put my head up to the bowl, but for some reason it looked far more dirty than I had remembered, strange pink colours and small hairs growing into larger textures, hyper detailed, I was too grossed out to do it. I tried to remember what I had been, when I had felt, if I had ever been sane, and I realised that I couldn’t even comprehend the idea that there was once a me that existed out of this state of mind. There was no me, there was never a me, I didn’t exist until this day, in this state, and now it is over, all of it gone, robbed. Memories were replaced with memories I knew were not my own, and while I understood factual data perfectly, no information had any implicit meaning to me, I couldn’t understand, but I could know. It was impossibly frustrating, I knew I was insane and I was completely powerless to stop it, the small shards of my ego still clinging for life and freedom. But then, finally, they let it go, I realised that, at this point, there was no enemy, it wasn’t any drug and it wasn’t me, because I didn’t exist anymore, so what did it matter?

T+3:00 - 6:00

Suddenly, everything made sense, oh my god! Joy! Elation! I could feel, touch, think, exist! I was one, I was all! Everything in front of me, thoughts came back, facts came back, I could understand my thoughts, because I didn’t need to try to understand, thinking was not necessary. It was a moment of pure awe, I had never gripped that, oh my GOD! I’m alive! The world! It’s alive! Matter in tact, dancing in tune with my heart, I turned on Tycho, I took a dab, I danced and screamed. I was crying, running around my apartment, shouting “wow!” and making explosion sounds with my mouth, I felt biblical, it was all still here! Never had I ever felt so grateful and in wonder about my mere ability to move and see, the beauty was overwhelming, I sobbed and (oh so dramatically) fell to my knees in my bathroom, staring up at my window, beaming sun in my face. I stretched my hands to the sky, laughing in ecstasy. Oh my god!

I could, I could speak, and sing, and feel, words cascading out of my mouth, momentous poetic instances I had been stretching and reaching to release for months, I was released, out of my shell. The fever and fret was gone, euphoria rushing through my body, I felt rooted and incredibly stimulated, so positive, I couldn’t contain myself. I honestly just did this for hours and hours, until I was mostly down, and then I shared most of my ideas and thoughts with my friends, I texted my family, I told them I loved them, I told myself I loved me, I went outside and let myself be hugged by the sun.

Geometry

Level 1-6 - The visual geometry of Psilocin, in this instance, presented an artistic style similar to what I have experienced with 25C-NBOMe, 2C-P, 2C-C, and LSA. Geometry manifested itself in large form and individually defined structures of symmetrical and constantly shifting shapes. Highly detailed and fast paced in motion, there were different layers, which presented their own, 3D, definitions at level 6, but were never apparitions from thin air. All projected geometry was to be found embedded in textures and previously existing structures. Transformations were organic in nature, deep in detail, and implicitly understandable on both an emotional and cognitive level. In my comparison to related tryptamines, 4-HO-DMT continues to present itself in a profoundly different manner than 4-AcO-DMT.